Free Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) by Henry S. Whitehead, David Stuart Davies

which was long remembered in His Majesty King Edward’s loyal colony of Barbados, B.W.I.
    It was, as Williamson’s maternal grandmother had confided to him, almost as though this horrible experience had unhinged Mr Morley’s mind. Williamson himself had been born within a year, and Douglas Morley, who had in the meantime sold out the sugar estates in which most of his own and his young wife’s money had been invested, had removed to New York where he instituted a Bond Brokerage business. This Williamson had inherited two years after his graduation from college, at the time of his father’s death at the rather premature age of forty-seven.
    Douglas Morley, according to his grandmother’s report and his own experience, had included his son in the strange attitude of dislike and contemptuous indifference which the devastating experience with the orang-utan had seemed to bring into existence.
    We were not out of school when Mrs Douglas Morley died, and Williamson went back to the Madison Avenue house to live with his father.
    Mr Morley had a kind of apartment built in for him, quite separate from his own part of the house. He could not, it seemed, bear to have Williamson under his eye, even though his plain duty and ordinary usage and custom made it incumbent on him to share his home with his son. The two of them saw each other as little as possible. Williamson had inherited his mother’s property, and this his father administered for him as I must record to his credit, in an admirably competent and painstaking manner, so that Williamson was already a rich man well before his father’s death about doubled his material possessions.
    I have gone into this detail largely because I want to accentuate how extremely regrettable, it seemed to me, was Sylvia’s unaccountable attitude, which I have described, to one of the best and kindliest fellows on earth, after a childhood and youth such as he had been subjected to because of some obscure psychological slant of a very odd fish of a father for which, of course, he was in no way responsible himself.
    Well, now Sylvia was gone, too, and Williamson Morley was once more alone in the world so far as the possession of near relatives went, and free to do about as he pleased.
    His one comment, now that he was presumably settled down with me for the winter, about his late wife, I mean, was a very simple one, unconnected with anything that had been said or even alluded to, in answer to my carefully-phrased first personal word of regret for his loss.
    ‘I did everything I knew how, Gerald.’
    There was a world of meaning, a résumé of quiet suffering, patiently and I am sure bravely, borne in those few and simple words so characteristic of Williamson Morley.
    He did, once, refer to his mother during his visit with me, which lasted for several months. It was apropos of his asking my help in classifying and arranging a brief-case full of papers, legal and otherwise, which he had brought along, the documentation connected with a final settlement of his financial affairs. He had disposed of his bond-brokerage business immediately after his wife’s death.
    There were various family records – wills, and suchlike – among these papers, and I noted among these as I sorted and helped arrange them for Morley, sitting opposite him at the big table on my West gallery, the recurring names of various kinsfolk of his – Parkers, Morleys, Graves, Putneys – but a total absence of the family name Williamson. I had asked him, without any particular purpose, hardly even curiosity over so small a matter, whether there were not some Williamson relatives, that being his own baptismal name.
    ‘That’s a curious thing, Gerald,’ said Morley, reflectively, in his peculiarly deep and mellow voice. ‘My poor mother always – well, simply abominated the name. I suppose that’s how come I got it fastened on me – because she disliked it! You see, when I was born – it was in New York, in Roosevelt